Here's the worst part: You will survive. Get those images of Jason Robards in The Day After out of your head. This is not that. We're not talking here about multiple-entry 20-megaton warheads wiping whole cities off the map in seconds. A single terrorist nuke, more likely in the 5- to 10-kiloton range (Hiroshima was 12 kilotons), will kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people in any big city but spare the rest. In New York, that will leave about 7.5 million of us to sort through the carnage.

WHEW...i thought i might be a goner there, but i can survive.....

So, what should you do? For all survivors within 20 miles, the immediate task will be to stay away from fires and avoid the fallout for at least a couple of days. (The vast majority of radioactivity fades away that quickly.) The only two methods of avoiding fallout would be:

A) to take shelter until the radiation danger fades, or

B) if you have time, evacuate the area, heading in a perpendicular direction to the fallout wind.

ummmm.....ok,but, what about everything that's now contaminated for the next 500 years? oh...wait a sec...not to worry...just take a pill:

In either case, it would be a very good idea for everyone in the exposed area to take potassium iodide pills, a relatively harmless substance that prevents your thyroid from soaking up radio-iodine and thus lowers the risk of future thyroid cancer.

see.....nuclear weapons aren't as bad as everyone has made them out to be. we can safely toss a few around the globe and people will survive...what's the big deal? and, if we get hit with one, why just hide under your desk until it's over...that's all.

Actually he's at least partially right. NOTE I SAID PARTIALLY!! Do they release radiation? Damned Right. Is it nasty stuff? Absolutely. But especially with the designs that replaced the big single warhead city-busters of the early fifties the levels have been radically reduced. The long term radialogical damage (it's the short-dwell isotopes that decay in the first week or so that are the real bitch of nuclear weapons) from even one of the bigger 500-700kt warheads is less than you find in the air five miles downwind of a coal powerplant.

A bomb produces massive localized radiation with a short dwell time but after the first month what's left are levels that will increase local cancer risks over the long term but not enough to worry about compared to the much larger sources we stick in our city centers anyway in the form of powerplants and factories.

There is a massive difference between a bomb and a Chernobyl. Less than a hundred pounds of material is being fissioned inside such a bomb. With proper techniques you could get a couple kilotons from a device with maybe fifteen pounds. At Chernobyl it wasn't the reactor breaching, it was the approximately five to ten metric tons (records are shoddy) of expended and highly radioactive waste they were storing right beside it getting released into the atmosphere that made it so bad. The wastes they were storing were of slow-decaying types that stick around unlike most of what a bomb makes which ends up decaying through several stages into isotopes that aren't radioactive enough to be overly concerned about in a few weeks.

_________________I am disillusioned enough to believe nothing will get any better yet compelled to make the attempt regardless